Category Archives: Feature

My Blogging Retrospective Part 1: Don’t Take Every Job

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As part of my three year retrospective and the count down to five hundred posts on this blog, I wanted to make sure I covered how I started blogging full time, and how things have changed today. I wanted to cover how stressful it is to be a full time blogger and how it can be hard to say “no” to jobs that come up. I think too many people still think that it is either too easy or too difficult to become a full time blogger, and I think that this post among others will help people understand the career choice a bit better.

Becoming a Problogger

My history with blogging has been as much about passion as luck. I have always enjoyed writing fiction, but never assumed I would take a career in writing as computers and technology were my primary passions. When Darren Rowse decided to go on vacation, I applied as one of the people that would guest post on one of his many blogs while he was gone, and despite not blogging on his most important blog, Problogger, I was still noticed by Jacob Gower, who has purchased a variety of high profile blogs.

At first it looked like I was going to have two part time blogging jobs, but Jacob stepped up and hired me full time. My pay was fairly low, especially after taxes were set aside, but thanks to the support of my wife, we were able to make ends meet. My first tip for someone looking to go full time in blogging is to find ways to cut your expenses. The lower your expenses, the easier it is to find a blogging job that can pay for them. Especially today with competition getting higher and higher for the positions available online, you will want to find ways to make yourself very valuable to companies while still being able to afford to eat reasonably.

I started out doing over a dozen posts a day on a variety of different sites. I was writing for a large group of brand new blogs as well as a small group of heavily established sites. I found it very stressful but also very exhilarating. I was working from home for a living. I didn’t care about the long hours or low pay because the job was interesting and fun. I spent hours researching my favourite technologies and writing about them. I was on top of the daily advancements in computers, cell phones, and blogging. It was a hard job, but also felt very fulfilling.

As time progressed, I slowly made more, and was able to do less posting. I was grateful for this change as it allowed me to switch from being a low end content producer into a writer. I was able to give thought and emotion to my articles, as well as really start to show my creativity and passion. And again, I felt fulfilled by my job.

The biggest issue that I started to notice though was that I had made everything I was interested in, into a job. I no longer had any hobbies outside of work, and even playing video games became a work oriented expenditure of time and energy. Instead of diving into a game and enjoying it, I was thinking about the storyline, graphics, controls, and plotting out my thoughts for review later on when I was back in WordPress composing a post.

This realization changed blogging for me, and made me wonder about my ability to do it for a longer period of time. If all of the things I was interested in were connected to my job, how would I unwind and just enjoy myself? I still recommend that anyone who wants to really get into blogging start writing about your passions first, as it will help set you apart from the masses of new blogs being created every day where the sole purpose is to generate profit.

Taking on Too Much

Money was still tight at the time, and so I didn’t have long to really reflect on that realization, and then did what most bloggers end up doing: I took on more projects.

I started a few blogs of my own in hopes of one day working entirely for myself, as well as working on some blogs for another network, dailypixel. I went from working ten or more hours a day to spending all day on the computer. I tried to set some time aside for my wife, but otherwise I was glued to my RSS reader, or the WordPress administration panel. Sometimes, I would pull an all nighter in hopes of catching up in work, as I always felt like I was falling behind.

When taking on the job with James at dailypixel, I really didn’t think about my worth and ended up requesting a rate of around ten dollars for every three posts. How did I come to this rate? I assumed that I could write around three posts per hour, and so I would be making a rate of ten dollars an hour. The issue is that I didn’t think about research time, nor the fatigue I would have from both my full time blogging job and my own personal projects.

Soon the blogging burnout hit all of my work and Jacob, my boss at Bloggy Network noticed it and asked me to adjust the deal so that I would only be working for him. Other part time blogging opportunities came my way, and I turned them down. Either because of the deal with Bloggy Network or because they weren’t going to offer me a rate that could really make it worth my time to ask Jacob to break the deal.

I eventually closed down the blogs I had started for myself as they weren’t growing very fast, and looking at the statistics of the newer blogs that I was working on for Bloggy Network, it would take upwards of a year before the sites started showing any real signs of making a profit from the time I was putting into creating content for them.

Changing Blog Networks

Pick the right network. One thing I learned early on was that different bloggers do exceptionally well in different blog networks. It takes a variety of different pieces that need to fit together perfectly before you create an amazing blogger to blog network relationship. For the most part I experienced that connection with Bloggy Network. I was pretty much in charge of a variety of projects, and was depended on for a variety of things. This made me feel important and successful. Being in control of the content I produced, and feeling like I was part of the executive team helped me remain inspired and committed to my job.

Switching over to Splashpress Media, I felt a little like a small fish in a big pond, and despite Mark Saunders, the owner, working hard to integrate me well into the team, I still always felt like an outsider. Add to that the lack of response to some business related ideas I had, and it just wasn’t a good fit for me at that time. I definitely learned a lot by being in the wrong blog network for me, and so I am definitely glad I had that experience. Also, I want to mention that Splashpress Media is a great company to work for, but it just didn’t suit me at that time in my career.

Bigger blog networks definitely feel more secure in nature, but if you aren’t part of the executive team, you end up feeling like little more than a content producer, and after doing that for a few years, I wanted more control, and responsibility. Smaller blog networks feel more unstable, but also more agile and responsive to business related ideas. Also, at Bloggy Network, everyone needed to be a swiss army knife with a wide range of usable skills over and above writing and so there were very few instances where I was bored.

Conclusion

My main tip in this post would be that anyone looking to become a full time blogger in a blog network take the time to research the blog network and talk to both people within the company and outside of it to really get a good understanding of the culture and needs of the network before you join and don’t take every job that comes your way.

This post is part one of three parts. The third part will be the 500th post on this blog and as part of my work towards this milestone I will be working on improving this site greatly, so please keep checking back.

Check out Part Two: Build Your Personal Brand
Check out Part Three: Going Beyond Blogging

Originally posted on June 26, 2008 @ 4:34 pm

Zombies and MMO Bloggers

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A Zombie post on a mainstream blog? It’s Friday so let’s have a little fun.

Zombies have become quite popular in our society as of late, almost fashionable. You know they’re popular when Hollywood starts pumping out Zombie movie sequels. Titles like “Resident Evil,” “Dawn of the Dead” and “28 Days Later” have brought Zombies from the B Movie genre to mainstream America.

A Zombie, for those of you who don’t know, is created by a virus that reanimates the dead body of it’s host. The result is an “undead” being in a mindless state with no other choice than to follow basic instincts.

Most zombies tend to act very similar to the other zombies, showing no apparent thought process of their own.

This zombie is the same as that zombie who is the same as the other zombie. After being involved in the MMO blogging niche for a while now, I think I see some resemblances, let’s see if you agree.

Make Money Online Bloggers

If you read my own blog then you know I have a bit of healthy disdain for the MMO blogging niche in general. Too many of these blogs are simply the same blog over and over and over just with a different theme.

They regurgitate the same posts, the same thoughts and pump the same tired array of products that everyone else is pushing. In my mind they almost look like they are going through the motions, alive but not really alive.

Kind of like a zombie. Would it be out of the question to compare your typical MMO blogger to a Zombie? Let’s try it.

MMO Bloggers and Zombies

  • Zombies have little direction, they just kind of wander around looking for a victim. MMO bloggers have no direction and they too wander around and look for victims.
  • Zombies feed on living flesh in order to survive. MMO bloggers feed on the desperation of their readers in order to survive.
  • Zombies are gullible. They’ll fall for almost anything. MMO bloggers are gullible as hell and usually end up spending more than they earn trying to make money online.
  • Zombies make no sense and communicate by grunting. MMO bloggers would usually make MORE sense if all they did was grunt.
  • Zombies are so desperate they would even eat their own parents. MMO bloggers would sign their own mother up for a recurring paypal subscription if they could make a buck.
  • Zombies tend to follow the herd and go with the flow. MMO bloggers would follow John Chow over a cliff if he told them they could make money doing it.
  • Zombies multiply by turning their victims into Zombies. MMO bloggers seem to multiply by turning their victims into MMO bloggers.
  • A Zombie is never going to have an original thought go through his head again. MMO bloggers check with John Chow first to find out what their original thought is for the day.

Disclaimer

Ok so maybe some of these are a bit harsh but they are meant tongue in cheek. Like anything of this nature there is a bit of reality in each combined with a healthy dose of sarcastic humor. Before you send me hate mail, I AM a MMO Blogger.

The point of the article is that you don’t need to follow the herd in order to be successful. If you looked at a raging horde of zombies coming down the street, you probably couldn’t pick one from the other.

The same can be true for most MMO blogs. If you ever truly expect to make any money then you need to find a way to stand out from the crowd. Separate yourself from the norm and find a niche of your own that you can thrive in.

You need to find a way to be purple.

So before I go, I am sure I missed a few clever analogies, anyone have any more?

This Friday Featured post was written by Bill so if you enjoyed reading it then check out my own blog at The Blog Entrepreneur where I write on a variety of MMO topics but particularly niche site creation. Sign up for my FREE Niche Site Creation Newsletter.

Originally posted on May 30, 2008 @ 7:16 am

Are Your Ad Prices Too High?

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Filling your advertising inventory with AdSense and affiliate links? Hoping that putting up an advertising page will convince advertisers to contact you and promote their products or services? They might never come, and if they do, will they pay the fees you have requested?

How did you decide on your advertising prices?

CPM

One way that I have always tried to make my advertising as fair as possible is to decide my rates based on a sliding CPM scale. The more traffic I get, the lower the cost per thousand advertising impressions gets in any advertising spot I have available.

This means that I will still get more money for advertising spots as I get more traffic, but it also keeps my rates at a reasonable and affordable level.

When I had over ten thousands page views a month, I wanted to get twenty dollars a month, or a rate of $2 CPM. Since then, I have been sliding that rate ever downwards. Currently, this blog earns only $0.15 CPM and while that doesn’t sound like much, that still comes to $60 for a 125 by 125 pixel banner in the sidebar.

Also, you have to remember that your CPM rate is per advertisement, and as such over the entire page, you might make upwards of $0.50 CPM to $50 CPM. It really depends on your audience, number and placement of advertisements, size of your traffic, and the competition for advertising spaces on your site.

CPC

Another way that I decided rates on blogs before was to try out an advertising position with my own ad first, placing various affiliate programs or AdSense, and looking at the number of clicks. If you have two hundred clicks on an ad space in any given month, that can quickly be converted into real figures that most advertisers can understand.

Most advertisers want to pay as little as possible for clicks, but if you have proof of clicks, they might be more willing to advertise on your blog then throwing money at CPM advertising where they don’t know what kind of real traffic they can expect to see to their blog.

So we take those two hundred ad clicks we talked about, and convert that into a figure of around $0.20 per click, and you get an advertising total for a specific position of $40 for the month.
Cheaper rotational ads or expensive ads?

You can research the CPC rates you might want to consider on Google’s Traffic Estimator tool, among other places, though I find that their rates are usually an order of magnitude higher than most private advertisers are willing to pay, so use your best discretion.

Competition

Another great way to price advertising is to be competitive. I have advertised on a few sites that I found with rates far lower than other blogs of the same size, traffic, and community. Bargains just beg to be advertised on, and so if you look at your immediate competition, it can give you some key indicators on what you should price your own advertising at.

Just be sure not to price yourself too low, as there are psychological effects of pricing too low that will stop possible potential advertisers from considering you, as they will wonder what the problem with your site is that you don’t value the advertising space properly.

Other Effects

Another thing that most people don’t consider when setting their advertising rates, but it can be very important to potential advertisers is the number of advertising positions you have open.

Advertisers know that the more advertising spots that you have open, the less likely a visitor will notice their specific ad, and as such, the less likely they are to make money, or build branding by advertising with you.

Some people like to go crazy when it comes to adding advertising positions, while others like to limit advertising to just one position. I have always been on the heavier side of the equation, and I try to make sure to adjust my prices to make sure that advertisers are getting the best deal possible.

It can be very hard to find higher priced advertisers for your site, and so I have never been one to chase the “super sponsor” before, but it is something I still think about from time to time.

Discounting

Discounting your advertising in exchange for longer advertising periods is almost always a smart move. It reduces the amount of time you have to spend actively searching for advertisers, and it provides the advertisers a better chance to really drive their branding home, but there are other ways you can hopefully win advertisers through discounting.

Contests have helped many bloggers become very popular in a short period of time, and usually those prizes are sponsored in some way. If you find a company that has a product your audience would really like, it never hurts to ask them if they would send the product to a contest winner in exchange for advertising. The worst they could say is “no”, and then you either try to negotiate with them, or move on.

You could also try to sell them on buying multiple types of ads, or price exclusive deals for slightly more money. Currently, I have a few different advertisements for WordPress theme makers. I probably could have asked for slightly more money from one of them and in turn gave them exclusivity during the month as the only advertisement about WordPress themes.

The only issue with providing exclusivity in such a way is that as soon as you agree to provide exclusivity, competing companies come out of the woodwork wanting advertising inventory.

Lastly, another great way of getting advertisers, if you don’t need the cash in hand is to trade for product. I have received free product from a few advertisers, and in turn provided them a spot to place their banner on my site. This is one of my favourite types of advertising because it allows me to get the product, and I only accept this type of advertising when it is something that I really want or think I would enjoy. This type of advertising is fairly guilt-free as I am promoting something I own and usually enjoy.

Conclusion

There are many other ways to price advertising, and I think most people randomly select a figure they would be comfortable with. Usually though, in the advertisers mind, it ends up being too expensive or too inexpensive that they wonder “what’s wrong”. Correct pricing can help secure you more advertisers, and make sure you are getting properly compensated.

Originally posted on May 18, 2008 @ 1:22 pm

My Blogging Retrospective Part 2: Build Your Personal Brand

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Over the last three years, I have realized that the most important thing when it comes to building up a business online is your personal brand.

Even if you are working as a blogger in a blog network, you need to be focused on building your personal brand over anything else, or you could be left without a job if the winds of change happen to hit your current employer.

If you are a blogging building up your own sites, it also is in your best interest to build your own personal brand. Building your own brand online takes a lot of work, and forces you to think in a different way about your content, your work, and how you build your site. Building a brand online requires you to network, socialize, try new things and really put yourself out there in a way that goes beyond just posting something and forgetting about it.

Each piece of content you put up should have a piece of your personality within it, so that your readers can really connect with you and become passionate about your writing.

The first piece of advice I always give to a budding blogger is to spend time networking. When I first got into blogging, I wasn’t very good at networking, and I feel like it really limited my career options, not that I am complaining about the last few years, but if I had worked harder on networking, who knows how far I could have gone in the same amount of time.

Some of the small attempts that I did make at networking helped secure me jobs, and get my name known by a few people. In fact, without contacting Jacob Gower for an interview, I doubt I ever would have got the full time job with him that lasted two years. Without taking the time to submit an application to Darren Rowse to guest blog and following up on it, I doubt I would have been chosen to write on his laptop blog.

These small movements in the networking space are what catapulted my career and it really isn’t about getting to know the biggest internet celebrities, or the bloggers in positions you want to be in, but keeping your eyes open for opportunities, and being passionate. The more you can share your passions with others, the more chances you create for yourself to build powerful and lasting connections.

Get Out and Socialize

This brings me to another key aspect of building your personal brand: socializing. If you always just stay in your house, in your protective bubble so to speak, then you will never get to that higher level when it comes to building your personal brand. Finding events you can attend like conferences and blogger meetups can really help you connect with your peers and open up new opportunities.

While living in Ottawa, I was one of the founders of the Ottawa Blogger Meetup with James Cogan, and as the group grew the local news paper picked up on it and sent someone to cover the event. This ended up with me and others getting our picture in the paper as well as a long article that heavily featured myself as well as other bloggers in the Ottawa area.

This was thanks to attending the event, and is becoming more and more common as blogging related news hits the mainstream more and more. I am always hearing about some of my colleagues getting themselves and their sites mentioned in major newspapers or even on television. This helps build your personal brand in leaps and bounds.

Don’t get me wrong though. You don’t have to be covered by traditional media to make meetups and conferences worthwhile. Just meeting peers with different talents can quickly help you. I have done many jobs in trade for help with my weaknesses. I write posts for them, they do design work for me, and both of us do better in our careers over the long term.

I have also been to conferences and events where it was just nice to unwind and take everything in, something which can really quickly recharge the creativity battery that can run down from time to time.

Build Something of Your Own

Another thing I recommend for every blogger is to start their own projects, and especially ones where money isn’t a concern, and where you feel safe to test the waters in various ways. It could be a personal blog, or about a specific topic, but the idea is to have something of your own where you can learn, play and expand your talents in ways that any blogging work might not let you do.

This is also a place where you can continue to build your personal brand, allowing you to create a single message.

When I was blogging on a dozen different sites, I didn’t feel like anyone had a central place to understand who I was, what I do, or what I enjoyed, and so I started finding ways to pull things together. First I started doing roundups on my personal blog about what I was posting about on other blogs, and then moved all of my thoughts and ideas over to this blog, and built my super feed, which is a Yahoo Pipes to Feedburner implementation that allowed people to subscribe to one feed and be able to read all of the posting I was doing on dozens of blogs.

I loved building these little projects as they helped me tie my brand and work together.

Add Variety to Your Life

One of my favourite things was to try various mediums when putting my message and brand out there. I was the co-host of the WordPress Podcast, and still am the co-host of the TechCanuck Podcast. I enjoy the audio medium, though not editing. It also woke me up to the fact that there are so many different ways to put what I had to say out into the world, and by trying to do things with audio and video, I was expanding my audience and building new ways for them to connect to my ideas.

One of the things I enjoyed the most, but didn’t always turn out the best was live streaming on Ustream. It allowed me to interact with people in a whole new way. I was answering their questions live on video. While they didn’t really need to see me, as I was just a talking head, it was still quite an experience for me.

Sometimes writing all of the time can get boring and adding in special things like audio, video or other multimedia can help freshen up a blog and even bring it to the next level. I am always considering bringing the XFEP podcast back because I enjoyed recording it, but the production time is definitely a lot higher than posting some text.

Give Freely of Your Time

The last thing I wanted to talk about in this part of my retrospective is the idea of giving freely of your time. So many of the things that have gotten me to this point have been thanks to finding time to give a friend or network connection some of my time and help them towards their goals. Usually, if they are a good person, this pays huge dividends for you in the end, and if it doesn’t, sometimes just being attached to certain brands online can help boost your career. I think being able to name drop, while a little snob-like, can help remind people how relevant you are, at least until you become a name people recognize.

If Darren hadn’t let me work on his laptop blog, would Jacob have felt compelled to hire me on? If I hadn’t worked on FineFools, would I have ever made some of the friends I have today that have taught me things that have helped me in various ways?

Sometimes working on guest posts for other blogs can lead to full time jobs. Sometimes co-hosting or guest hosting a podcast can open all sorts of doors, and sometimes teaching someone something new on your blog can lead to book deals. You need to be patient and willing to give freely of your time. If you are always chasing money, then you will miss out on all of the secondary benefits and opportunities that will come your way.

Conclusion

Building a business around blogging is hard, but building a brand online that you can leverage in a variety of ways is easy and definitely worthwhile. I can’t even count the number of times that my career has been boosted in some way thanks to the continual work I do on networking, socializing, building my own projects, trying new things, and giving my time freely to those around me.

If you feel like you are stuck in your blogging career and aren’t reaching the heights you want, then you are probably missing one of these important factors that go into building your personal brand, so go back and brainstorm on what you can do to get to that next level.

This post is part two of three parts. The third part will be the 500th post on this blog and as part of my work towards this milestone I will be working on improving this site greatly, so please keep checking back.

Check out Part One: Don’t Take Every Job
Check out Part Three: Going Beyond Blogging

Originally posted on June 27, 2008 @ 12:09 pm

Starting a Successful Blog: WordPress

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I am currently working on starting another blog to keep a friend of mine busy writing online. The blog will cover television and everything in that sphere, and is called TV Gawker. As I am sure you can guess, TV Watcher was already taken.

The first step I took in setting up the site was to download my favourite blog software WordPress, which I transferred onto my server using Subversion, a system that will allow me to easily upgrade the blog as each new version is released.

WordPress is simple and effective blogging software, and while it doesn’t easily support multiple blog set-ups, I have found it easy to work with and partnered with Subversion, it handles my needs quite well.

Setting up WordPress isn’t all that difficult. I turn off the visual editor, change my password, fill out my profile, and then move to the settings pages to make sure everything looks correct. I change the permalinks to something more “human” and I usually change the category prefix to a keyword in hopes of helping the sites SEO.

I haven’t gone back and installed all of the plugins I like using, but I will be doing that soon. Choosing and configuring them take much more time than pretty much any other step.

I chose the Tarski theme for TV Gawker because I love it, and have for a long time. I will probably be using it as the basis for all of the blogs in my little network going forward, once I customize it for each site.

Once the user information, settings, and design are taken care of, I delete the introductory post that all WordPress blogs start with and then create the main category set I want the blog to use. On a blog like TV Gawker, which will be covering such a wide niche, the category list was quite long, but putting commas between categories made quick work of adding them all.

Once I have WordPress set up, it is all about generating content, and thankfully I have a great friend of mine taking care of the majority of that.

The next step will be to set up all of the WordPress plugins that the site needs, and then work on creating some pillar articles which I can promote in the social network world. Then I will be working on gaining inbound links, and finally, finding ways to monetize the site. Keep watching back for more as I document loosely the process of launching TV Gawker from nothing, into hopefully gaining an audience of around a ten thousand page views a day.

Originally posted on June 5, 2008 @ 5:19 pm